The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
If uncertainty is a postmodern strategy, we notice that Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 constantly raises expectations that it refuses to fulfil. Discuss the ways this approach operates in the novel.
When Oedipa is discussing with Roseman the logistics involved in executing Pierce Inverarity's will, Roseman asks:
‘But aren't you even interested?'
‘In what?'
‘In what you might find out.'
As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations.
(Pynchon, 2000, p.12)
She does indeed have revelations, but they only reveal further layers of a vast indecipherable mystery. There is an expectation that Oedipa will discover some ultimate meaningbehind Inverarity's estate, WASTE and the post horn and what seems to be the wizard behind the curtain: Tristero. But this never happens. What Pynchon does is use the promise of resolution as bait toget us through the book. As the novel unfolds (or folds in on itself) only more uncertainties are revealed.
There are many reasons for this. Mainly that Lot 49 is an allegory for America in the 1960s. It is a representation of the fads, the confusion, the paranoia, and the drugs that engulfed America in the 60s. Lot 49 , like the conspiracy theories surroundingthe assassination of JFK, underground terrorist groups the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the CIA and radical ideas on the consciousness expanding agendas of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, never really delivers all it promised.
What was thought of as the American Dream was gradually being blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald, the Viet Congand LSD. The current craving for nostalgia has obscured what that period really meant, and anybody who wasn't there could have no real idea what it was like anyway.
Reflectingon that period in America , Hunter S Thompson wrote:
‘History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.' (Thompson, 1998, p.67)
Pynchon also mentions this ‘national reflex' when Oedipa visits San Narciso college (Pynchon, 2000, p.71). One of the reasons for this reflex was the effect of consciousness altering drugs like mescalin, psylocibin and LSD.
Altering consciousness to change history is an ambitious prospect, but it worked on some level; otherwise we wouldn't continue to refer to it. The influence of psychedelic drugs is debateable, but they certainly permeated the so-called ‘counter-culture'. It is hard to imagine John Lennon singing “Nothingis real” or Timothy Leary encouraging people to ‘Turn on, Tune in, and Drop Out' with out the aid of some form of ‘trendy chemical amusement' (Zappa, 1996). LSD was not new - it was synthesised in 19** - and writer Aldous Huxley had used it and written about it in The Doors of Perception (ref). Of Huxley's theories on psychedelic drugs, Tom Wolfe wrote:
He compared the brain to a ‘reducing valve.' In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. (Wolfe, 1989 p.44)
This could easily be said of Lot 49. It is so densely layered that it is a strugg le to sort all the information out. The reader, like Oedipa, must become a sort of Maxwell's Demon (Pynchon, 2000, p.59), jugg lingthe multiplying facets of the plot and narrowing down of possible truths in a universe that seems familiar enough but is horrifyingly abnormal in its details.
Oedipa rejects drugs (Pynchon, 2000, p.10) so her departure from her usual America can be seen as a trip into a parallel universe. Goingto San Nariciso represents Oedipa's transition into an alternate reality, another universe, deeper into the layers of 1960s America . Oedipa's trip to San Narciso and her feeling that she is behind the soundproof glass of a radio station (Pynchon, 2000, p.15) is her journey Through The Looking Glass. Like Alice, she is confronted with riddles and absurdities, strange characters, dead ends and half-truths.
San Narciso for Oedipa, like Burroughs' Interzone , Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, or Las Vegas in Thompson's Fear & Loathing, is a place where anything is possible, truth is objective or as Burroughs says ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted' (Burroughs, 1981, p. 13). Oedipa describes San Narciso as ‘less an identifiable city than a group of concepts' (Pynchon 2000, p.14) and upon arriving there feels as if ‘a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding' (Pynchon 2000, p.15). Each world has a system that governs its behaviour and different norms and possibilities.
The friction between these worlds, ‘a search among alternate universes' (Pynchon, 2000, p.71) is where Oedipa's quest lies. We cannot be entirely sure that all this occurs in a universe of Oedipa's own making. She even asks herself ‘Shall I project a world?' (Pynchon, 2000, p. 56). Therefore, the novel hinges on the question of what McHale calls an ‘ontological concern' (Connor, 1997, p. 130) or ‘What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when the boundaries between worlds are violated?' (Connor 1997, p.130).
The worlds that Oedipa confronts in San Narciso are less in confrontation than worlds within worlds; a kind of Russian doll of possibilities. Upon entering the town, she recalls having looked at a printed circuit inside a transistor radio and arrivingin San Narciso, sees a resemblance: ‘The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.' (Pynchon, 2000, p.14).
Everything she comes across on her search has that infinite quality; that what she discovers is only the doorway to deeper mystery, clues within clues. Like the time she visits Mr. Thoth, Oedipa feels ‘as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal' (Pynchon, 2000, p.64) or at Cohen's where ‘she saw him framed in a long succession or train of doorways, room after room' (Pynchon, 2000, p.65). This recalls the effect produced by holding two mirrors up against each other; an infinite series of reflections which the end of cannot be seen because where it should be is obscured by the viewer. As Oedipa says, ‘she glanced down the corridor of Cohen's rooms in the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible toget lost in this' (Pynchon, 2000, p.66).
It's not just labyrinthine realities that confuse Oedipa, it is also the disparate snatches of information she collects that are disorientatingrather than affirming. Lot 49 is also about the flow and control of information. If information is so diverse, conflictingand contradictory then how can the truth begrasped at? The instantaneous access to information through television and computers leaves the citizen really only the instant at which the information is received in which to process it. The next image or byte of information will be along in nanoseconds. Like trying to watch a film frame by frame in real time, it can't possibly be understood. The speed of information and images necessitates a writing of history as it happens. If all images, items, personalities are thrown in together, they can be sorted out later. But by then they're perhaps irrelevant and there is no time to sort ‘later' because there is no later. The present is continual, the now ceases to be the now as soon as it occurs. Time, like Oedipa says of America, is a constant, we just live in it. Oedipa's quest is not necessarily for more information but a ‘system' that will decode the clues she has come across. America itself is the system by which the rush of images and clues can be deciphered and placed into a coherent whole. But the nature of a self-perpetuating system, a closed system is that entropy will occur. If Oedipa does crack the code, her world will cease to exist; there will be nothing left to know. Oedipa's search is a self-validatingone as well as an outward manifestation of the impossibility of an overall equation, or system of meaning. The only certainty is that there is nothing certain.
The answer to the question is that there is only more questions.
References
Burroughs, W.S. 1981, Cities of The Red Night , Picador, London
Connor S., 1997, Postmodern Culture , Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Cambridge MA
Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions , University of Illinois Press, Chicago
Pynchon T. , 2000, The Crying of Lot 49 , Vin tage, London
Thompson H.S. 1998, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Flamingo, London
Wolfe T. 1989, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Black Swan, London
-- Luke McKay
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